It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

Friday, August 12, 2011

VPXD.EXE at 100%

After a relaxing 20 days vacation I’m back.

And right on my first day back a weird issue had pop up.

Virtual Center could not be opened, the O.S. was very unresponsible, when checking the processor utilization it was at 100% all the time and the most offender process was vpxd.exe

Getting a little of background of what have happened during my absence I realized the VC has been moved from one cluster to a new one. (it was supposed to happen since we are migrating our environment).

I started wondering if the issues could be because of that change and then I decided to revert it.

After shutdown the VC and register it back to it’s previous host/cluster the O.S just started normally, Virtual Center was working fine again.

But several v-motions tasks (started by DRS) started.
I wait all v-motion tasks to finish and the work load to establish on the new cluster.

At this point I can only guess
When VC started on the new cluster and tried to load balance it’s load through DRS it got kind of crazy with the situation of a new guest has been added to the cluster while it’s off, not just any guest, in fact the problem was because it’s new guest is the virtual center itself, so it went in a kind of loop.

That’s what I did to successfully migrate the VC to the target cluster.

I disabled DRS for the new cluster.
Shutdown VC again
Register it on the new host/cluster
Start the VC again

This time the VC has started properly and I just needed to enable DRS back.

Lesson learned:
When moving your VC to another cluster, first disabled DRS on the target cluster and re-enable it back after the migration.

Post a Comment

Who am I

I’m an IT specialist with over 15 years of experience, working from IT infrastructure to management products, troubleshooting and project management skills from medium to large environments.
Nowadays I'm working for VMware as a Consulting Architect, helping customers to embrace the Cloud Era and make them successfully on their journey.
Despite the fact I'm a VMware employee these postings reflect my own opinion and do not represents VMware's position, strategies or opinions.
Reach me at @dumeirell